Look, people, I'm conservative. I'm a very moderate and rather purple one but nonetheless believe in these principles:
- Responsible (personal responsibility and self-reliance)
- Pro-enterprise (living within our means, support for responsible free market economy)
- Pro-freedom (freedom of choice, liberty, free speech)
- Pro-defence (strong national defence, security, safety)
- Pro-justice (rule of law, justice)
- Pro-community (diversity, tolerance, inclusive, openness, international)
- Pro-opportunity (equality of opportunity for all, aspiration, empowerment, education, social mobility)
- Compassionate (prioritising the vulnerable, social justice, civic-minded)
- Pro-democracy (patriotism, limited government, pro-family, sovereignty, localism)
- Principled (fairness, integrity, pragmatism, respect)
- Forward-looking (support gradual change, stewardship of heritage and environment, supportive of innovation and technology)
That said, there's a wild difference between the
allegedly egalitarian promise of these principles and the delivery
thereof.
While the right wing conservatives like to talk a good game about morality, they just can't keep their stories straight. But why? I've noticed five reasons.
It's all about control
While the right wing conservatives like to talk a good game about morality, they just can't keep their stories straight. But why? I've noticed five reasons.
- The supremacy of religious considerations
- The abandonment of objective reality
- Control of the narrative
- The demotion of liberal democracy
- The pursuit of power
Okay, let's dig in:
The Supremacy of religious considerations
I could have titled this point "Nice Constitution
you have there, it'd be a shame if anything happened to it." Well that
ship has sailed. The fact that Christmas and Easter are national
holidays in America kicks the First Amendment to the
kerb. I'm not complaining, I'm just saying if they were consistent in
their believe in the awesomeness and perfection of the Constitution,
those days wouldn't be official national holidays, they'd be treated
like any other day of the week. They're not because
theists of various stripes have have had control of the nation's
law-making from Day One, and from that day to this they've tried every
possible way of circumventing the Constitution they're sworn to uphold.
This is because the route to power if you're conservative
is to suck up to the religious fundamentalists and if the Constitution
takes a hit, so be it. We're seeing this all the time in the
anti-abortion legislation popping up all the time in the Red States. The
people pushing these laws do not care who they hurt;
they please the base, so up they go onto the books until somebody takes
them to court to overturn them.
The abandonment of objective reality
Am I the only one who blamed George Bush's embrace
of the Neocons for this? If you did too, we're both wrong. The National
Review's William F. Buckley began the new wave of "Know-Nothingness," a
point provided by Techdirt commenter Rocky. Checking this out led me to the Letters from an American blog, where
I found this:
In 1951, William F. Buckley, Jr., fresh out of college, wrote a book attacking that consensus by attacking fact-based argument. In God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom,” Buckley said that trying to reach the truth by constructing arguments out of facts—the premise of the Enlightenment-- was a worse superstition than the Dark Age traditions the Enlightenment tried to root out. When presented with fact-based arguments, voters kept choosing the liberal consensus. So far as Buckley was concerned, that consensus flew in the face of God’s laws. So, Buckley concluded, it was imperative to stop arguing based on facts, and simply promote a “Conservative” view of the world by whatever means necessary.The construction of a narrative undercutting the popular liberal consensus took the modern Republican Party further and further away from a fact-based reality, until by 2002, journalist Ron Suskind had this extraordinary exchange with one of President George W. Bush’s aides."The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles…. He cut me off. 'That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. '…When we act, we create our own reality…. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”Ten years later, in 2012, Thomas E. Mann from the left-leaning Brookings Institution and Norm Ornstein from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute warned that it was imperative to stop saying “both sides do it,” because the parties were not equally polarized. “The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics,” they wrote. “It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.” - December 26, 2019, by Heather Cox Richardson for Letters from an American
That's right, folks, William F. Buckley invented
the concept of lying to own the libs. This explains why the National
Review's former correspondent Kevin D. Williamson lied about the NHS and
the National Review left the lies up, uncorrected.
The lie was the point, so they can quit whining about moral relativism
until they quit doing their version of it. And though the Never Trumper
decry their nation's Glorious Leader for his boorish behaviour, there is
a direct line from Buckley to Karl Rove
to Trump; he's the logical endgame. No wonder his base is so excited
about him. They commend his honesty not because they've been duped into
thinking he's a respectable gentleman but because he is out and proud
about who he is, thereby giving them permission
to hold nazi rallies, etc.
Control of the narrative
Take a look at Russell Kirk's Ten Conservative Principles, paying particular attention to the fifth and sixth points:
This is why we can't have nice things. It's why the rich keep getting richer, the poor keep getting poorer, and any effort to make the rich pay their share results in cries of "Socialism!" and "Don't punish the rich for their success!" They honestly believe that a society with a strong safety net and healthcare that is free at the point of delivery will turn us into anarchic maniacs bored of life in an orderly society. It's also why the Western powers gleefully celebrated the right wing coup that brought down Bolivia's successful Morales regime (here was no evidence of fraud in the elections), and it's why homeless and vulnerable people on benefits are ignored and neglected by the state until they die of it. It's why they often think of benefits claimants as feckless and lazy. It's why the likes of Gina Rinehart can say, with a straight face, that the minimum wage needs to drop to benefit the economy. You can't make things better for everyone and the poor ought to take one for the team that the very rich may bask in their wealth. Ditto healthcare. The message there is, "If you can't pay, go away."
Controlling the narrative means framing every story that might portray them as the bad guys is spun to declare them the victims of left wing conspiracists. Therefore, tax increases are punishing success and driving job creators away. Since they mostly own the mainstream media, this is the dominant narrative while the counterpoints are restricted to the left wing outlets, where they get fewer views. As a result, the commonsense view becomes "Don't tax the rich, they create jobs and this will drive them away." Ditto raising the minimum wage.
The Randian elements of the American Republican party have taken over, elevating "job creators" over the rest of us and granting them privileges that the rest of us don't have. Instead of recognising the role workers play in creating wealth for our employers by, you know, actually making and serving things, they deny it altogether and cast us as ungrateful leeches and moochers jealous of our bosses' success. Now they would stop us from voting if they could. Actually, they've been able to restrict voting in a lot of mean and petty ways despite voter fraud being rare.
He got ratioed for that in the comments. And since when did letting poor people vote destroy the country? See my last point. They've also enacted voter restrictions that effectively deny voting rights to anyone without photo ID, i.e. driver's licence or passport. In some states, they've restricted the early voting period. This hits the poor; black people in particular. The very idea of liberal democracy offends them because it means that those of us who aren't wealthy are getting enough as it is; they don't want us voting ourselves into better lives. Oh, and the most religious ones want to dismantle the Constitution and replace it with a theocracy, forgetting that when the Church runs the state you can't be sure of which one will.
The American Right is more interested in power than in the benefit of the country. They gleefully dismantle the pillars of democracy by making it harder to vote or for people to be registered as citizens or for people to enter the country. Why? Power. Since many of these people are hyper-religious white supremacists in a demographically changing country, they're becoming desperate to enforce on their compatriots their vision of an ideal America that never existed. The white picket fences, the stay-at-home wife, and the sepia-toned prosperity was never going to last, where it did at all. Their vision is mostly a media construct. Yet they insist, as if the nuclear family has always been the most common model (extended family models like The Waltons were actually the norm), on trying to impose this, promoting marriage as a way out of poverty while denying aid to battered wives for the sake of parental involvement. They don't make any mention of parental involvement denied by killing the mother. For the sake of propping up their share of the power pie, they're willing to dismantle America itself in order to "save" it, and they don't care who suffers as a result.
It's important to challenge the false narratives in public fora such as Twitter or in the comments sections of online newspapers and blog posts. It's really all we can do. We can also signal boost competing narratives from opposing sources.
Lying to people to maintain an every more unequal status quo is not going to maintain it for long. People start to see through the lies, then the liars lose credibility. The Right's problems are of their own making. If we can't believe them, we can't take them seriously. The trouble is, too many people do. We need to talk to them and keep talking till the truth sinks in.
Fifth, conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety.the principle of variety. They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. [Emphasis mine] The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at levelling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality.
Sixth, conservatives are chastened by their principle of imperfectability. Human nature suffers irremediably from certain grave faults, the conservatives know. Man being imperfect, no perfect social order ever can be created. Because of human restlessness, mankind would grow rebellious under any utopian domination and would break out once more in violent discontent—or else expire of boredom. To seek for utopia is to end in disaster, the conservative says: we are not made for perfect things. All that we reasonably can expect is a tolerably ordered, just, and free society, in which some evils, maladjustments, and suffering will continue to lurk. [Emphasis mine] By proper attention to prudent reform, we may preserve and improve this tolerable order. But if the old institutional and moral safeguards of a nation are neglected, then the anarchic impulse in humankind breaks loose: “the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The ideologues who promise the perfection of man and society have converted a great part of the twentieth-century world into a terrestrial hell.
This is why we can't have nice things. It's why the rich keep getting richer, the poor keep getting poorer, and any effort to make the rich pay their share results in cries of "Socialism!" and "Don't punish the rich for their success!" They honestly believe that a society with a strong safety net and healthcare that is free at the point of delivery will turn us into anarchic maniacs bored of life in an orderly society. It's also why the Western powers gleefully celebrated the right wing coup that brought down Bolivia's successful Morales regime (here was no evidence of fraud in the elections), and it's why homeless and vulnerable people on benefits are ignored and neglected by the state until they die of it. It's why they often think of benefits claimants as feckless and lazy. It's why the likes of Gina Rinehart can say, with a straight face, that the minimum wage needs to drop to benefit the economy. You can't make things better for everyone and the poor ought to take one for the team that the very rich may bask in their wealth. Ditto healthcare. The message there is, "If you can't pay, go away."
Controlling the narrative means framing every story that might portray them as the bad guys is spun to declare them the victims of left wing conspiracists. Therefore, tax increases are punishing success and driving job creators away. Since they mostly own the mainstream media, this is the dominant narrative while the counterpoints are restricted to the left wing outlets, where they get fewer views. As a result, the commonsense view becomes "Don't tax the rich, they create jobs and this will drive them away." Ditto raising the minimum wage.
The demotion of liberal democracy
The Randian elements of the American Republican party have taken over, elevating "job creators" over the rest of us and granting them privileges that the rest of us don't have. Instead of recognising the role workers play in creating wealth for our employers by, you know, actually making and serving things, they deny it altogether and cast us as ungrateful leeches and moochers jealous of our bosses' success. Now they would stop us from voting if they could. Actually, they've been able to restrict voting in a lot of mean and petty ways despite voter fraud being rare.
It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.
A decade before the Motor-Voter law that required states to register voters at welfare offices was enacted, NAACP official Joe Madison explained the political economy of voter registration drives. “When people are standing in line to get cheese and butter or unemployment compensation, you don't have to tell them how to vote,” said Madison, now a radio talk show host in Washington, D.C. “They know how to vote.” - Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-Americanby Matthew Vadum for The American Thinker.
He got ratioed for that in the comments. And since when did letting poor people vote destroy the country? See my last point. They've also enacted voter restrictions that effectively deny voting rights to anyone without photo ID, i.e. driver's licence or passport. In some states, they've restricted the early voting period. This hits the poor; black people in particular. The very idea of liberal democracy offends them because it means that those of us who aren't wealthy are getting enough as it is; they don't want us voting ourselves into better lives. Oh, and the most religious ones want to dismantle the Constitution and replace it with a theocracy, forgetting that when the Church runs the state you can't be sure of which one will.
The pursuit of power
The American Right is more interested in power than in the benefit of the country. They gleefully dismantle the pillars of democracy by making it harder to vote or for people to be registered as citizens or for people to enter the country. Why? Power. Since many of these people are hyper-religious white supremacists in a demographically changing country, they're becoming desperate to enforce on their compatriots their vision of an ideal America that never existed. The white picket fences, the stay-at-home wife, and the sepia-toned prosperity was never going to last, where it did at all. Their vision is mostly a media construct. Yet they insist, as if the nuclear family has always been the most common model (extended family models like The Waltons were actually the norm), on trying to impose this, promoting marriage as a way out of poverty while denying aid to battered wives for the sake of parental involvement. They don't make any mention of parental involvement denied by killing the mother. For the sake of propping up their share of the power pie, they're willing to dismantle America itself in order to "save" it, and they don't care who suffers as a result.
What can we do?
It's important to challenge the false narratives in public fora such as Twitter or in the comments sections of online newspapers and blog posts. It's really all we can do. We can also signal boost competing narratives from opposing sources.
Lying to people to maintain an every more unequal status quo is not going to maintain it for long. People start to see through the lies, then the liars lose credibility. The Right's problems are of their own making. If we can't believe them, we can't take them seriously. The trouble is, too many people do. We need to talk to them and keep talking till the truth sinks in.
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